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Summary
Summary
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
One of The New Yorker 's best books of 2024
A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.
"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents."
Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.
At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists--and star-crossed lovers--Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.
As we follow Mead and Bateson's fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.
Author Notes
Benjamin Breen is the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade , winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Breen (Age of Intoxication) blends fleet-footed biography with an accessible analysis of mid-20th-century research into "psychedelic" experiences as pioneered by anthropologist Margaret Mead, her husband and fellow anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and the Macy Foundation, a scientific group that became a CIA clearinghouse during the Cold War. Mead and Bateson first met in 1933, and in 1936 they conducted ethnographic research on trance states in Bali. That study led to Bateson's top secret work during WWII on "hypnosis-assisted interrogations" of Japanese and German POWs for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's precursor. The 1943 discovery of LSD in Zurich led to a postwar boom in research into mind-altering drugs, and during the first decades of the Cold War the CIA funded public LSD research through a program code-named MKULTRA, which was fronted by several Macy Foundation scientists. Breen chronicles the cultural impact these LSD trials had on the 1950s and '60s, which was heightened by Mead's sanctioning of LSD as a "cure for fear" at a time when she was arguably the best-known scientist in the world (due to her earlier paradigm-shifting ethnographic writing on sex in the South Pacific). Breen artfully weaves Mead's biography with fascinating details of the sprawling psychedelics scene (producers of the TV show Flipper took acid). The result is a riveting exploration of a shadowy episode in 20th-century history. (Jan.)